10-9-02 Oppression and Conflict Morton Deutsch
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10-9-02 OPPRESSION AND CONFLICT* MORTON DEUTSCH TEACHERS COLLEGE, COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY In this paper, I shall primarily focus on oppression and how to overcome it. Oppression is, I believe, at the root of many of the most serious, enduring conflicts in the world today. I refer to such conflicts as: ethnic, racial, and religious conflicts; conflicts between dictatorial governments and their citizens; the battle between the sexes; conflicts between management and labor; and conflicts between heterosexuals and homosexuals. Overcoming oppression will usually involve conflict with groups in power. Such conflicts have often taken a violent form. In the final section of my paper, I will discuss some nonviolent strategies and tactics for overcoming oppression. My paper is divided into the following sections: I. Some conjectures about the origins of oppression; II. A discussion of the nature of oppression; III. What forms does oppression take?; IV. What keeps oppression in place?; V. Awakening the sense of injustice; and, VI. A discussion of the strategies and tactics for overcoming oppression. My discussion will not focus on the different contexts in which oppression occur, such as: the family, work, education, and among ethnic, religious, and racial groups. It is my hope to develop a book in which a version of this paper would be an introductory chapter and other scholars would be recruited to write chapters about these more specific contexts of oppression and conflict. * Plenary address given at the annual meetings of the International Society of Justice Research in Skovde, Sweden on June 17, 2002. 1 I. Some Conjectures about the Origins of Oppression. Prior to the development of agriculture, the hunting-gathering-fishing societies were mainly egalitarian and cooperative. Since these very early nomadic societies generally did not accumulate and preserve food, all of the physically able members of such societies had to participate in securing the basic necessities of life. Whatever divisions occurred within these groups was mainly based upon sex, age, and individual physical and social abilities. The distribution of food, work products, and services tended to be egalitarian except during extreme scarcity, when survival of the group required giving priority to those who could contribute most to its survival. The aged and infirm would often have low priority. Levels of conflict and oppression within such societies appeared to be low. Conflicts with other similar societies mainly occurred as a result of one group’s encroachment on another group’s territory. Such conflict resulted from, the need to expand one’s territory as a result of population growth or because one’s territory was no longer productive of food and the other resources needed for group survival. The simple technologies of hunting-gathering-fishing societies did not allow them to accumulate a surplus of food. As such groups experienced a growth in their populations, the balance between them and their environment was upset. To overcome the threats to their survival, about 12,000 years ago, some of these societies developed agriculture and animal husbandry. This development led to two revolutionary consequences, which fostered social inequality and oppression: differentiation within societies and warfare between societies, (Gil, 1998). The accumulation of a surplus of food led to the emergence of new occupations – such as 2 traders, merchants, administrators, artisans, soldiers, and rulers; not all the members of the society were required to be involved in the production of food. One can speculate that social hierarchies developed as some food growers were more successful than others because of skill or luck. To obtain food, the unsuccessful peasants became dependent upon the successful ones and had to offer their land and services – often as a worker, priest, or soldier – to the more successful ones. For the successful ones, the result was increased wealth, increased godliness, support from the priests, and increased support from soldiers with the resulting power to appropriate the land and control the services of those who were weaker. Contests among the powerful would increase the power of the winners to exploit those who were weaker as would alliances among the more powerful. Another way of increasing power was through successful warfare against weaker societies. Success would lead to the expropriation of much of the wealth of the weaker society as well as enslavement of some of its population. In summary, one can speculate that the need for the relatively egalitarian hunting- gathering-fishing societies to have stable sources of food led to the development of agriculture and animal husbandry. Small inequalities in luck or skills among the peasants within an agricultural society, or between societies, could lead to social inequalities and power differences that, in turn, could lead to increased power, social inequalities, and oppression of the weak by the strong. II. What is Oppression? Oppression is the experience of repeated, widespread, systemic injustice. It need not be extreme and involve the legal system (as in slavery, apartheid, or the lack of right to vote) nor violent (as in tyrannical societies). Harvey (1999) has used the term “civilized oppression” to 3 characterize the everyday processes of oppression in normal life. Civilized oppression “is embedded in unquestioned norms, habits, and symbols, in the assumptions underlying institutions and rules, and the collective consequences of following those rules. It refers to the vast and deep injustices some groups suffer as a consequence of often unconscious assumptions and reactions of well-meaning people in ordinary interactions which are supported by the media and cultural stereotypes as well as by the structural features of bureaucratic hierarchies and market mechanisms.” (Young, 1990, p.41) We cannot eliminate this structural oppression by getting rid of the rulers or by making some new laws, because oppressions are systematically reproduced in the major economic, political and cultural institutions. While specific privileged groups are the beneficiaries of the oppression of other groups, and thus have an interest in the continuation of the status quo, they do not typically understand themselves to be agents of oppression. III. What Forms Does Oppression Take? I consider here five types of injustices that are involved in oppression: distributive injustice, procedural injustice, retributive injustice, moral exclusion, and cultural imperialism. To identify which groups of people are oppressed and what forms their oppression takes, each of these five types of injustice should be examined. Distributive Injustice. Under this heading, I shall briefly consider the distribution of four types of capital (Perrucci and Wysong, 1998) – consumption, investment, skill, and social. Consumption capital is usually thought of as “standard of living.” In industrial societies, this is very much related to income. It includes the amounts and types of food and water, housing, clothing, health care, education, physical mobility (such as travel), recreation, and 4 services that are available to members of a group. Clearly, there are gross differences in income and standard living among the different nations, among the different ethnic groups within nations, among the different classes, and between the sexes. For example, compare Sudan with Canada, African Americans with Euro-Americans, employees of General Motors and its executives, males and females. Sen, for example (in Sen and Drèze, 1999, Chapter 7, p.140, in the book titled “India, Economic Development, and Social Opportunity”) writes: “women tend in general to fare quite badly in relative terms compared to men, even within the same families. This is reflected not only in such matters as education and opportunity to develop talents, but also in the more elementary fields of nutrition, health, and survival.” He estimated that there are “more than a hundred million missing women,” in Asia and North Africa, as a result of the unequal deprivations they suffer, compared to men. In other words, the survival rates of women compared to men is considerably lower than could be expected when these are compared to the relative survival rates of men and women in Europe, North America, and sub-Saharan Africa where the differences in consumption capital available to males and females is not as unequal. Investment capital “is what people use to create more capital” (Perruci and Wysong, 1999, p.10). Income is related to consumption capital and, also, wealth, which in turn, is related to investment capital. Generally, wealth is distributed more unequally than income. The inequalities among nations, within nations, among ethnic groups, among the social classes, between the physically impaired and unimpaired, and between the sexes are apt to be considerably greater with regard to investment than consumption capital1. In 1992 in the US, the 1 There appear to be exceptions to this in affluent countries, due to the greater longevity of women compared to men: the affluent widows inheriting the wealth accumulated by their deceased husbands. 5 top one percent of the population possessed 45.6% of the financial assets while the bottom 80 percent had only 7.8% (op. cit. p.13), and this discrepancy has undoubtedly increased since then. Skill capital is the specialized knowledge, social and work skills, as well as the various forms of intelligence and credentials that are developed as a result of education